Early preview of Kentico CMS 5.5

The development of Kentico CMS 5.5 reached the final state and we are just fixing some minor issues. In this blog post I would like to inform you about the most important changes and news in the upcoming version 5.5.

Hi,

there are a lot of minor changes as always, so we will go through the top items that you should know about.

.NET 4.0
Kentico CMS 5.5 supports .NET 4.0 and VS 2010. That means, you can open and compile Kentico CMS solution by VS 2010 without any obstacles.

Going mobile
The Corporate Starter Site shows you how to prepare some parts of the website that are optimized for the mobile devices. You can learn how to re-use content from the “big” web and provide it to the mobile devices using different CSS/Layout/Pages. There is also a new Webpart that redirects web-based mobile device to the mobile part of the web site.

New integration features
Features like MetaWeblogAPI support and Microsoft Sharepoint Server support that are now available for the download at the Marketplace become integral part of the Kentico CMS 5.5.

And we added support of two very often asked features: Facebook Connect and OpenID support. That means, from now users can use their Facebook ID or OpenID to register or sign-in. Kentico CMS supports together with LiveID all the most common used external authorization services, so you can better create your community sites.

Syndication webparts and widgets
Kentico CMS 5.5 brings a lot of new webparts and widgets that can be used for the RSS feeds, Atom feeds or XML export.

Bing and Yahoo maps
Version 5.5 supports new map services Bing maps (former Live maps) and Yahoo maps. Together with Google maps, you can use all the most used worldwide mapping services.

Other interesting improvements

From other improvements I can mention:

Disabling of Sitemanager access to Global Admins

that you can use to have sites admins without the access to the development,

Google analytics webpart where you can use the Google tracking code to integrate your web-site with Google Analytics service,

Multiple master pages - from now we can set any page in the content tree as the master page template that breaks automatically the inheritance of the parent's master template,

Template scopes that you can use to limit the usage of specific page templates to only specific locations at the web site,

Better paging in the CMSDesk and Site manager,

Smart search indexes Users and Custom tables so we can use smart search to find any information in all users and custom tables,

We can add/remove modules from the existing Kentico CMS installation using Kentico CMS Installer

All new features and improvements are described in the following presentation.